UCN @ Sophia Quarterly Newsletter 1-2016

Foreword

Year 2015 was an important milestone for Labex UCN@Sophia which reached mid-term and will now enter in a new phase of project maturation, achievements, and results expoitation. January 2016 will be another crucial period corresponding to the final evaluation phase for the UCA JEDI Idex proposal.

In this contex full of promises, the UCN@Sophia Labex Steering Committee team wishes you an Happy New Year 2016, a lot of success in your projects and partnerships, and all the best in your private and professional life.

News

Leaving and welcome. Sarah Fontaine is leaving the UCN@Sophia Labex adventure at the end of January. She thanks all the teams and partners, with whom she has collaborated during this work experience.Sylvie Dupas will replace her for the financial part and a new communication officer will begin on February.

Meddays 2016. On March 9-11, Labex UCN@Sophia, Inria Sophia Antipolis Mediterranée, I3S and LEAT laboratory will welcome more than 30 students from Mediterranean Countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Morocco, Turkey, Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt), who were selected for their excellent academic record. They are invited to attend the presentations of the SophiaTech Campus, its Master curriculums, scientific teams and range of jobs/activities..

Scientific Advisory Board. The Labex set up an international advisory board of high profile scientists to gain independent assessment of its activity and an opportunity to discuss future trends in its thematic areas with internationally renowed experts. The UCN@Sophia Scientific Advisory board is composed of:

General Assemby. A Labex UCN@Sophia General Assembly will be organised on June 13, 2016. This will be the opportunity to give a complete overview of the Labex scientific activity, to disseminate the Labex action and to receive input from the Scientific Advisory Board.

Matteo Sereno is a UCN@Sophia Labex visiting professor welcomed by the MAESTRO team at Inria. He arrived in Sophia Antipolis at the beginning of October 2015 and will stay until the end of March 2016. The research plan he wants to carry on matches the new ongoing research activity in Maestro team on optimization of smart grids, Patrick Loiseau’s interest on network economics and Fabien Hermenier’s work on energy-efficient data centers. This work will also be the foundation for an H2020 proposal.

Matteo Sereno is a full professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Salerno and received the qualification of Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Turin in 1992. The research activity of Matteo Sereno addresses performance evaluation of complex systems such as communication networks and computation systems. In particular, he works on:

formalisms for performance evaluation and efficient algorithms for reliability evaluation;

energy efficency in networks and distributed systems.

On November 26, Matteo Sereno presented a talk about "Profit Maximization via Energy Consumption Reduction in Cooperative Resource Management Systems" in the UCN@Sophia Labex seminar series. During this talk, he focused on cooperative behaviors that enable energy efficient management strategies. In particular he presented two applications of the cooperative game theory to cellular access networks and to green cloud federations. In the former case he presented a study aiming at maximizing the profit of Network Operators of green cellular networks in situations where Quality-of-Service guarantees must be ensured to users, and Base Stations can be shared among different operators. In the latter case, he showed that cooperation among set of Cloud Providers, that agree to mutually use their own resources, represents a promising solution to reduce their energy costs. In both cases the exploitation of cooperative game theory frameworks enable the development of algorithms that can be implemented in distributed way that allow a set of players (that in the first case are network operators while in the latter are cloud providers) to cooperatively set up their federations to optimize their power consumptions.

On December 14, UCN @ Sophia Labex received M. Laurent Dever, head of the ANR Labex action, and M. François James, head of the "Mathematics" theme to which UCN @ Sophia belongs, following the mid-term evaluation of June 2015. Their visit was the opportunity to discuss the Strengths/Weaknesses analysis made by the mid-term Labex jury, to clarify the Labex actions and to discuss the future priorities for the Labex. To show how the Labex calls are integrated in a global scientific policy and the impact of the Labex on the SophiaTech campus partners, a scientific report was produced, highlighting two large scientific projects as an illustration. This report is available here. This scientific reporting work will be extended to other scientific activities funded by the labex in a near future.

2015 assessment

2015 was a year full of scientific activities, seminars, partnerships and successful collaborations for the UCN @ Sophia Labex.

Key figures:

6 visiting researchers: Michele Magno from the ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Claudia d'Amato from the University of Bari (Italy), Elisabeth de Carvalho from the Aalborg University (Denmark), André de Almeida from the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza (Brazil), Joergen Bang Jensen from the University of Southern Denmark and Matteo Sereno from the University of Turin

5 new PhD students. They join so the 14 other UCN @ Sophia Labex PhD students, that counts now 19 PhD students (1 PhD gave up during the year).

2 scientific and experimentation workshops with the CIM-PACA Conception Platform on May 26 (see the detailed program here) and with the Com4Innov Platform on September 22 (see the detailed program here).

Mid-term evaluation on June.

2 Development Engineers recruited.

Open calls

Visiting researcher call. This call is a continous Labex call for funding high-profile researcher visits. The UCN@Sophia Labex now also accept successive visits spread over a period of 2 to 3 years. Read more.